Musings of an anarchist misfit

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Monthly Archives: April 2016

I’m not going to much blame the specific claimed recruiter (Arun Kumar), because I strongly suspect he might not be an actual person. These slime are running address and phone number harvesting bots and ever since yesterday have been repeatedly spamming and robo-calling me about a job I am at best minimally qualified for.

Gotta love the mangled English, too. Realize that there’s plenty of well-educated people in India and Pakistan who have no difficulty using proper English grammar, and who thanks to the low standard of living in either country can be hired for a song compared to Western salaries. But of course if you’re a total sleaze outfit you can hire someone less educated in English for a song compared to them, so that’s what you’ll do.

It’s going to be closed while Bertha tunnels under it, and given that there already have been subsidence and sinkhole issues caused by the tunneling, the chance of collapse-inducing damage is greater while at the same time the chance of the collapse actually hurting anyone is far lower.

Given that the Viaduct is on its last legs anyhow, it’s either going to collapse before it is demolished or be demolished before it collapses. And given how it’s already in territory that was previously proclaimed to be unsafe, but retroactively claimed to be safe, because the state doesn’t want to tear it down without a replacement in place, its best that the procrastinating be ended now.

And given that the tunnel project was always an unrealistic boondoggle, it’s better that it be cancelled sooner rather than later, as a result of its subsidence damaging an obsolete viaduct as opposed to a perfectly good and non-obsolete downtown building or two.

And once the viaduct is out of service for good, Seattle will then be compelled get busy with the process of figuring out how to live without it.

(This is the second of two posts which I had written down intending to repost here long ago, and only just recently rediscovered.)

… huge ones, in fact. But it is still the economic system of classic liberalism, based on the pro-freedom insight that letting people do as they choose need not create chaos and dystopia and can in fact create peace and self-organizing order.

Its biggest failure is in its indvidual-rewards mechanism. In attempting to reward valuable and useful effort, it ends up handing out privileges and creating a ruling class that subjugates others. The problem is not the rewarding of individual effort, but the way it is done. Rewards that create authoritarianism are anti-freedom and should be opposed.

But back to my first paragraph. That pro-freedom nature makes opposing capitalism tricky. One can’t simply get into the mindset that one is an anti-capitalist and then just oppose whatever the capitalist way of doing things is, all the time. If one does, one will often end up opposing freedom.

It’s part of the reason (only part, it was a feudalistic society with no tradition of nor much respect for freedom) the Soviet experiment went so badly for freedom. It’s also a reason to eschew the term “anti-capitalist,” which leads to just the wrong mindset when it comes to opposing and replacing capitalism.

I’ve never liked “anti-capitalist” much because it’s negative. I’d rather use labels based on what I am for, not what I am against. Now I have another reason to dislike the term.

This is the first of two posts which I had written down intending to repost here long ago, and only just recently rediscovered.

Any organization the size of Google, Microsoft, GM, Exxon Mobil, etc. should have its autonomy significantly curtailed and restricted by some form of public participation. Only relatively small organizations are deserving of autonomy. And all economic organizations should be non-authoritarian.

That latter one in particular is an ideal that would take serious time to implement throughout society. But the former part would be quite a bit easier. It need not take the traditional state socialist form of nationalization. In fact, in a world of increased globalization, traditional nationalization is less and less relevant.

Requiring such participation will inevitably bog down and restrict large economic players. That’s not a problem; in fact, that’s a large part of the point. Innovations are decisions about the future and such things are too important to be decided by unaccountable authoritarian power structures. The proper role of large organizations is in overseeing and coordinating established economic activities that cannot practically be undertaken by smaller organizations.

Small organizations would still have the autonomy to innovate under this proposal. That is the proper place for innovation to take place, where it subsequently has to prove itself to larger society via competition and other means, rather than having an authority structure clear an artificially easy path for it.

Squaring this with traditional anarchism might not always be easy. In particular the part about the large organizations might be tricky. Autonomy for smaller ones isn’t that different from what anarchism has always proposed.

Not much happened as a result of my having the discussion with my boss. They may have other projects I can work on which are a better match. On the other hand, they may also end up deciding I’m just too poor a match.

So while I remain employed I am also very much am back in the job market at this point.

The title of this post describes my current job. It’s still going strong, as far as my boss is concerned (so far as I can tell), but it’s winding down so far as I am concerned, and I plan to announce this to my boss at tomorrow’s regularly-scheduled meeting.

When I took it, I had my qualms that it might not be the best of matches. The screening process contained a surprising amount of front end Javascript questions (such coding is not my strong suit). Plus the more I heard about it, the more I had doubts the position could furnish the sort of engrossing challenges I need. I mentioned these concerns and was assured that my impressions were incorrect.

The past six months have served to convince me that I was in fact correct. It’s getting to the point where I dread new assignments. It’s clearly time to start thinking about moving on if things can’t change dramatically (and I frankly doubt they can).

The only real question is what kind of ending can be worked out, which largely depends on their needs (if they only or mostly have a need for someone to do the sort of work I regard as unpleasant drudgery, the end will come sooner rather than later).